Borrowing an emblematic line from Gregory Scofield’s poem responding to and honouring Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, She is spitting a mouthful of stars is a year-long series surveying multidisciplinary approaches to protest, resistance and activism. Through the incorporation of digital media, installation, performance, poetry, photography and video, the artists present varied approaches to both public and personal subjects of strife.

The first project in the series features Annie MacDonell’s video installation Holding Still // Holding Together (2016) and Adrian Stimson’s ongoing performance 150 Blows. Originally commissioned for the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC), the multi-channel video work Holding Still // Holding Together departs from documentary photographs of passive political protesters. The images are restaged in a series of videos that examine and unpack the complicated tactic of going limp as an act of political resistance. Stimson’s 150 Blows marks Canada’s 150th anniversary of Confederation and continued invasion of Indigenous lands. By taking portraits of willing subjects, Stimson projects images of 150 Canadians over his own body, symbolically performing acts of pleasure, sacrifice and resistance.

She is spitting a mouthful of stars honours contemporary artists’ approaches to defiance and struggle, and celebrates 22 years of collaboration between Tribe Inc. and AKA.

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Amy Malbeuf is a Métis visual artist from Rich Lake, Alberta. Through utilizing mediums such as caribou hair tufting, beadwork, installation, performance, and video Malbeuf explores notions of identity, place, language, and ecology. Malbeuf has exhibited her work nationally and internationally at such venues as Art Mûr, Montréal, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina; Art Gallery of Alberta; and Pataka Art + Museum, Porirua, New Zealand. Malbeuf has participated in many international artist residencies including at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia; The Banff Centre; The Labrador Research Institute; and in 2015 was one of two Canada Council for the Arts fellows at the Santa Fe Art Institute, New Mexico. Malbeuf holds a MFA in Visual Art from the University of British Columbia Okanagan. In 2016 Malbeuf received a Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award and a William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists in Canada from the Hnatyshyn Foundation.

Annie MacDonell is a visual artist working across mediums. Her practice begins from the photographic impulse to frame and capture, but her output extends beyond photography. In recent years her work has included films, installations, sculpture, performance and writing. Her work questions the constitution, function, and circulation of images in the 21st century. She received a BFA from Ryerson University in 2000, followed by graduate studies at Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains, in France. Recent performances have been presented at le Centre Pompidou, in Paris, and the Toronto International Film Festival. Recent solo shows have been held at Mulherin New York, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Windsor and Mercer Union Gallery, in Toronto. She has participated in recent group exhibitions at la Bibliothèque National in Paris, The Power Plant, Toronto, MOCA Cleveland, the Daegu Photo Biennale in South Korea and Le Grand Palais, Paris. In 2012 and 2015, she was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award. In 2012 she was short-listed for the AGO AMIA prize for photography. In May of 2016 she’ll present a newly commissioned work at the Ryerson Image Centre, for CONTACT 2016. She lives with her family in Toronto and teaches in the photography program at Ryerson University.

Goth Shakira is an internet artist, writer and editor based in Montreal. She is interested in how low culture, mystic spirituality and memetic patterns of thought transmission relate to intersectional feminism. Her work has appeared in the FADER and has been covered by i-D, Flare and W magazines, and has been shown in Montreal, Toronto and London.

Gregory Scofield is Red River Metis of Cree, Scottish and European descent whose ancestry can be traced to the fur trade and to the Metis community of Kinesota, Manitoba. He has taught First Nations and Metis Literature and Creative Writing at Brandon University, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and the Alberta College of Art + Design. He currently holds the position of Assistant Professor in English at Laurentian University where he teaches Creative Writing, and previously served as writer-in-residence at the University of Manitoba, University of Winnipeg and Memorial University. Scofield won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 1994 for his debut collection, The Gathering: Stones for the Medicine Wheel. In addition to several volumes of poetry, Scofield is the author of the memoir, Thunder Through My Veins (1999), and his latest collection of poetry is Witness, I Am (2016). In 2016, The Writers’ Trust of Canada awarded Scofield with the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize.

Adrian Stimson is a member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation, his work includes paintings, installations, sculpture and performance. Adrian is well known for his performance personas, Buffalo Boy, Shaman Exterminator and Lord of the Plains. Adrian has exhibited nationally and internationally, has his MFA from the University of Saskatchewan and was awarded the Blackfoot Visual Arts Award in 2009, the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal in 2003 and the Alberta Centennial Medal in 2005. His work can be found in the collections of the British Museum, Canadian Art Bank and MacKenzie Art Gallery.